CBC Ombudsman
Reply to “As holidaying Canadians return to Cuba…” article by Evan Dyer on CBC.
March 7, 2023
Dear Ombudsman:
What has happened to journalism in Canada and more specifically to the CBC?
What has happened to speaking truth to power?
The unbelievable ignorance and superficiality reflected in the information in Mr. Dyer’s article are astounding. Is it ignorance or is it deliberate in ignoring the elephant in the room: the embargo (conservatively speaking) against Cuba by successive U.S. governments for the last sixty-plus years is never mentioned to round out the present-day context of the problems the people of Cuba are facing. The article reminds me of the proverbial fox in the henhouse and then blaming the hens for allowing themselves to be eaten.
Surely Mr. Dyer and his editors are aware of the U.S. policy of long-term sanctions and actions to destroy Cuba’s economy as outlined in a memo written April 6, 1960, by Lester Mallory, the Deputy Assistant Secretary of State for Inter-American Affairs in the U.S. government when it became obvious that changing the minds of the vast majority of people supporting the revolution was an impossibility. Mallory proposed that the U.S. “…deny money and supplies…to bring about hunger, desperation and overthrow of government.”
Since then economic and other measures have been initiated by the most powerful country in the world against an island off its coast in order to bring the country under U.S. control again as it was prior to the revolution. Is it deliberate on CBC’s part to present an article that subscribes to this U.S. policy, in effect for decades, by promoting the impression that Cuba’s socialist system doesn’t work?
Are we to assume now, after a decades-long history of friendship between the Cuban and Canadian governments, that the CBC will now parrot the U.S. line of hostility about Cuba?
Perhaps Mr. Dyer did not do his homework when writing this article but shame on the CBC for aligning itself with a U.S. policy that is consistently condemned year after year in the United Nations by practically all the countries of the world, including our own, and which President Obama himself said did not work. The fact that the people of Cuba have determinedly and consistently resisted these assaults against their sovereignty through the past decades simply shows how doggedly determined the majority of Cubans are to maintain their system of government and the CBC ought to apologize for publishing an article masquerading as journalism.
Lisa Makarchuk, from Toronto, Ontario.
